Cannabis Economy

Cannabis Economy (by Audio Archives) chronicles personal conversations with business leaders on Ingenuity, Inspiration...and Cannabis. Our first goal is to provide an oral history of legal cannabis in real-time. Who you are informs what you do. Business is personal. Follow us on Twitter @CannEconomy

Cannabis activist Shaleen Title joins us and takes us through her early realization that numbers made sense foisting her into accounting only to realize that drug policy was where she wanted to be. She joined SSDP and eventually had a hand in Amendment 64 passing in Colorado. She went to law school to get well versed in legal writing, political speech and how the law worked to serve her in her cannabis law reform work. She moved to the east coast and served in tax law for six months- her first day of orientation being the economic crash- which had her realize that the universe didn’t want or need her where she was- "Lehman just went down- but here’s your desk." Which is ultimately what set her on her ultimate path of full time cannabis policy.

Ricardo Baca, Ophelia Chong, David Brown and Jacquie Miller join us from Lift Toronto to tackle media in cannabis..and cannabis in media for that matter. Ricardo takes us through what he experienced in Colorado for the Cannabist, Ophelia touches on what she’s seen in imagery. David shares his Canadian experience. And Jacquie shares her experience coming from the mainstream media into the cannabis industry.

We discuss early days and when and how things changed along the way and we return to the conversation that we started with Derek Riedle in the last episode on what the media is, it’s purpose and how to ensure more trust in media from the each end of the general populace.

Recorded at Lift Toronto, Derek Riedle from Civilized join us and discusses the crossroads of the media industry- where it is now and how he looks at where it’s going. He went to college in Halifax wound up back in is home of New Brunswick and eventually was invited by a friend to California. He had been all around the world but never to the Golden State, so we went. After a few hours he called his wife and a month later they were looking for a place. He’s an old agency guy so he knows that agencies are hard businesses to scale. His moment of cannabis enlightenment came when he was at a nice dinner in Venice where he everyone in the restaurant was drinking beer wine and spirits while he was huddled behind the restaurant, behind a dumpster with his vape pen.

Recorded at Lift Expo Toronto, Random Vaughn joins us shares a history of Washington state legalization. He explains the process of getting a medical card, getting 15 plants and becoming a collective garden way back when. You did a bit of paperwork and could enter the industry after 30 minutes at a doctor’s office in his words. Random and his team have serviced over 30K patients and he discusses how he and his team approached cannabis wellness with the patients and consumers that visited the collective. And then Random shares getting relicensed for 502 and what happened in Washington when the state went from offering medical cannabis to a overtly adult-use market. He’s matter of fact about the facts on the ground.

Chuck Rifici joins us from Lift Expo in Toronto where he shares his history in cannabis. He’s currently working on a number of projects including funding cannabis licensed producers in Canada. The business structure is based on the mining industry in Canada. Chuck studied engineering and initially was interested in Virtual Reality, went into computer engineering founding an early internet service provider company becoming the CFO. After getting the education of a lifetime he went on to become the CFO of the liberal party in Canada working with Justin Trudeau. On another note, he was in the right place at the right time, reading the MMPR regulations within the first hour of them being released leading him to co-found Tweed.

Lamine Zarad joins us and provides a Banking 101 lesson. He joined Merrill Lynch at the height of the financial crisis doing his best to avert disaster. He realized at that height of the economic apocalypse that the only stable thing was the federal government which was going to be the savior of us all in his words- and he wanted to know how and why. He studied public policy and public finance and got a job at the US Treasury which is why we discuss the entanglement of the banking system and political system in the US, Dodd Frank, the Volker Rule, the Bank Secrecy Act as affected by the Patriot Act, Glass-Steagall, proprietary trading, FinTech, blockchain and how that all relates to cannabis.

Roger Stone joins us and discusses the United States Cannabis Coalition. He takes us through his interpretation of what’s been said by this administration in regards to cannabis law reform. He feels that the Attorney General and Homeland Security Secretary are not following what was prescribed during the campaign. With news of a potential crackdown on cannabis from the Justice Department, Roger feels that would be inconsistent with what was promised to voters and breaks faith with voters. The goal of the US Cannabis Coalition is to work with a coalition of republicans and democrats, liberals and conservatives, progressives and libertarians to reschedule cannabis.

Recorded in May Charlie Rutherford and I sit down for our second helping of Political Discourse. We once again focus on how we each see policy. We first discuss Jeff Sessions and his War on Drugs redux. We talk about tax policy in association with government services. We discuss the environment and education. We talk about employment as it relates to wages, CEO wages and productivity. We discuss immigration. We talk about AI and how automation affects the prospects of employment in the US in the future. And of course, we discuss healthcare and the concept of repeal and replace and what replace means through discovering a means for replace. Finally we discuss the perception of the right on the left and the left on the right.

Cassandra Farrington joins us and takes us through her background. Born and raised south of the Mason Dixon line, she went to the University of Alabama to study communications and marketing. A self-described introvert, she had a couple of good initial positions but went back to get her MBA. Upon graduating, her Fortune 100 job moved her to Denver. Serendipitously, an old business associate called at a moment which Cassandra was ready to move. Her operational experience made her the perfect fit. And that phone call turned into her running Marijuana Business Daily and the Marijuana Business Conference. However, those ideas were not the first ideas. But they were the ones, as you know, with the most explosive growth.